This page contains a handbook for people wanting to start a Wikimedia wiki in a language which does not yet have its own wiki. See Special:SiteMatrix for an overview of already existing wikis (red links are not-existing wikis).

Wikimedia will not host any wiki in a language or dialect that does not have a valid ISO 639 code, or a language in a script or orthography that is not commonly accepted or used. If you would like to start a personal project, see Incubator Plus on Wikia.

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Orthographic practices - if there is more than one way to spell or write your language, you will need rules about it.

Stylistic conventions - if your language does not have a standardised universal form (the way everybody speaks it to understand each other), you will need to have one or have a rule to tell people which forms or dialects of your language to use. Also, you will need more complex stylistic conventions (for an example, see here).

Step 5: Localisation

The interface needs to be localised into your language. "Localization" includes translating the MediaWiki interface. Translation is one of the requirements before a wiki can be created. You can do this at Translatewiki. It is usually done parallel to the work on the test wiki.

While it would be even better to translate the entire interface, for a first project in a language you only need to localise the "most used MediaWiki messages". These are the messages that are of most importance to our readers.

You are encouraged to join the language support team for your language, where you can provide information about your language (such as plural rules) or test functionality. If there is any technical problem, such as a lack of input methods or fonts for your language, do not hesitate to contact either through our community portal or on translatewiki.net.

Step 6: When the wiki is approved

If approved, the language committee will submit a bug request at Phabricator. Then it is only waiting on the developers to create the site. You can track the progress on Incubator:Site creation log.

Step 7: When the wiki is created

Stop! Maybe you want to copy all the pages from Incubator to the new wiki, but please do not do this.

Someone will import all the pages with their history, and without their prefixes.

If you want your own logo instead of the English one, upload it as "Wiki.png" to your local wiki and submit a Phabricator request. (If you don't know how to do that, you can ask for help).